The "Jedi mind trick" for successful innovation

Creativity and innovation advocates often seem in desperate search of "jedi mind tricks", some mechanism that will convert those who they see as "resistant to change" to enthusiastic supporters of their vision.

There is a simple "jedi mind trick" to innovation.... start listening!!!

I am firmly convinced that most innovation requires co-creation by many different players, each with different resources, different goals, different values, even different paradigms.

So the trick is to realize that although your idea for innovation seems complete and wonderful to you, those who are resisting and criticizing you are generally doing it because of factors and issues that need to be handled for the innovation to survive and thrive.

So, listen!  And co-create with them!

An innovation map to guide deliberate creativity

Mapping innovation goals by type of strategy and style of creativity can guide selection of innovators, tools, and  processes for deliberate creativity.

	Cost Leadership	Benefit Leadership
Adaptive	Improvements to current production process	Incremental improvements to current product or service to improve benefits
Innovative	Disruptive change to a new production process, delivering far lower costs than previous technology.	Transforming the nature of the product or service to deliver additional benefits the customer is ready to pay for.

In this mapping the two upper quadrants utilize adaptive creativity, as defined by Michael Kirton.  People and organizations of this style seek incremental changes to current methods, while those he characterizes as more to the innovator end of the scale seek ideas that challenge many more of the assumptions about the problem.

Strategy is mapped along original dimensions of Michael Porter, with the left quadrants seeking changes that allow them to offer much lower prices, driving up volume.  The rightmost quadrants focus on making changes that differentiate the product or service from others, allowing increase in profits from the increased prices that customers are willing to pay. Although shown as four "quadrants", each dimension has many, many points from extreme to extreme.

Of course there is a lot more to be said about strategy and creativity than these dimensions, but this simplified map separates the innovations and improvements in a way closely related to how we organize to get new opportunities. Many organizations assign the different quadrants to different parts of the organization, or to different specialized programs.

For example a Six Sigma program can be expected to discover many opportunities in the Adaptive Cost Leadership quadrant, but would be exceptional if it discovered a highly innovative product with features that provided new and highly valued customer benefits.  On the other hand, a Design Thinking focused effort to develop innovative and transformative new products is unlikely to deliver many ideas to incrementally improve the current production process.  The lower left quadrant in which extreme creativity is focused on disruptively better production and delivery processes are very well described by Clayton Christensen in his many works growing out of "Innovators Dilemma".  Actions in the top right quadrant attempt to deliver the intended package of benefits and functions in new ways with more benefits per cost, with techniques such as Value Engineering.

Innovation is a critical investment of organizational resources.  It should be targeted at areas where the greatest return  seems possible, and enough years of benefit to earn back the investment costs of developing and implementing innovative ideas.  While all quadrants should be surveyed constantly, strongly focused efforts on the area with the highest apparent potential for each product or service should return the greatest long term success.

Most importantly, the team composition, data analyzed, and creative methods need to be carefully fit to the intentions.  Even when the same people, data, and creativity techniques are used in the different areas, the way they are used can be quite different.  Managers and consultants organizing and leading product or service focused innovation efforts, need to either understand which kind of innovation they are best prepared to lead, or have the ability to adjust their facilitation to match these differences, as well as organizational, discipline, and cultural backgrounds or innovators and the organizations they serve.


Further reading:

Christensen, Clayton M. , The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail, Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard Business School Press,  (1997).
Kirton, M. "Adaptors and innovators: a description and measure", Journal of Applied Psychology (61:5) 1976, pp 622–629
Porter, M.E., "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors" New York: The Free Press (1980).

Innovation may not be improvement...

Lovers of innovation may not realize that a change for the new and different might be better, but it might not be the best way to succeed.

Some organizations can benefit most from doing a better job of “working to plan”.   Programs such as of quality, motivation, better hires, or better training help everyone improve their compliance to procedures and processes, reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction.

Others might find more benefit in improving those plans and procedures for products and services.   Management science, industrial engineering, work simplification allow workers and experts to discover procedures which enable more production from the given resources.

For others, the greatest benefit lies in redesigning the product or service to better fit customer needs and values.   Approaches such as product improvement, industrial design, and Value Engineering make changes to the actual product design to deliver more customer benefit for lower costs.

Of course, other companies need to shift to a whole new industry or niche as either they are overwhelmed by competitors or the entire market or industry disappears as technology changes.

It makes sense for those investing resources in improvement or innovation to first consider which level gives them the best opportunity, because each of these target levels require different knowledge and different types of thinking.
 

Innovation or strategic leadership consists both of choosing which aspect of which level has the most potential and assembling and leading teams in the optimum kinds of thinking to discover opportunities.

And the ultimate organizational decision is to decide the balance between efficient operations and innovative search in various areas, because the investment and the cultural dynamics are quite different for each type.

As innovators and innovation promoters, we must consider the very real possibility that those resisting our efforts have a better grasp on the strategic potential of each level, and greatest potential for success might be in an area that bores us...

It is not all the same...

Natural creativity is awesome, enjoyable, and often beneficial, which leads  many to deliberately seek creativity with a variety of tools, techniques, and attitudes.  But there are an infinity of things to be more creative about, and some are much more likely to give more useful success.  Since creativity, no matter how enjoyable, is a limited resource, it makes sense to be choiceful about which things to target.  The company focusing its innovation on building a highly efficient and accurate production line for buggy whips really needs to notice the emerging car industry making horse drawn buggies obsolete.

The creativity of constantly improving processes and performance to better fit the plan seems to take a different mindset and a different set of mental tools than trying to invent a whole new thing to plan for.  Michael Kirton addressed this by assessing people's creative tendencies along a scale from adaptive to innovative.  This is practically identical with Michael Porter's writing on strategy where he suggests that companies must choose whether to compete by being the lowest cost producer or the one which succeeds by differentiation, making their product different from others.

It is important to note that these endeavors often require different techniques for making thinking and conversations more creative.  For example, the classic method of brainstorming is excellent for making long lists of short ideas, and has the additional benefit of building fluency and flexibility of thinking in individuals and groups.  But often the thinking necessary for a particular type of opportunity is not an assemblage of small ideas, but thinking in large complex patterns.  We need short lists of long ideas.  More complex approaches such as analogies, visual brainstorming, and even extensive incubation are more likely to come up with ideas like E=MC squared.

As we attempt to become effective advocates, facilitators, and leaders of deliberate creativity and innovation, we need to become adept at a broad set of tools to most efficiently and effectively apply our creativity and knowledge to the right targets.

Or we can wait to get lucky...

Seeing the elephant

Some see innovation as a solo heroic trek, others see the assemblage of efforts from multiple sources.

One of my favorite stories for discussing the nature of complex creativity is "The Blind Men and the Elephant" in which blind men each encounter a different part of the animal and then argue that each completely understands reality. 

There are two opposing lessons that can be taken from the story.  One is that one should explore each of the aspects and become an expert on the whole elephant - to open your eyes.  The other is that by listening to each other, the blind men can share their knowledge, develop a synergy between their individual experience and a shared image of reality to take effective action to manage the elephant.

These are also two different visions of innovation.  In the heroic model, an individual possesses a unique mix of knowledge (if it wasn't unique, everyone would see the possibilities) and takes action to make something new.  Often the story is about how the innovator had most of the knowledge and then became aware of the last element and made things happen.  In others, the hero had a vision and called on other experts to deliver the needed components.

But I am more intrigued by a co-creative vision of innovation in which the equal participants learn to listen to each other and share a basic understanding of each others perspective, then work together to accomplish a goal which requires the synergy of their detailed knowledge and abilities.  It seems to me that the first model is limited to the size of the hero's head, but the co-creative model, while limited by communication capacity, has the potential to manage extremely complex goals and solutions.

 Going further, in The Knowledge Creating Company, Nonaka points out the hyper-text nature of teams, the idea that a team consists not just of its members and their abilities, but of all the resources they are connected to, like the links on a hyper-text web page.  With good process, such a linked network can handle much greater innovation both by contributing more elements and by learning with the innovation team the perspectives that will make the value of the innovation obvious.

So as I attempt to contribute to improved process for innovation, I am more attracted to the innovation than the idea, more attracted to the group AHA than individual creativity.

Co-creativity and democracy

Co-creativity is more than getting the ideas and perspectives of disparate players into our idea generation, but includes changing participants in ways which make new ideas possible.

One way to clarify this key aspect of co-creativity is to compare the democracy of the ancient Greeks to the electoral battles of today.

In the original democratic process, not only were a wide range of issues and perspectives welcomed into the discussion, but the decision makers participated in the debate and were open to having their knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions shifted by the process. As the debate proceeded, not only were ideas proposed and rejected, but the problem owners changed their expectations of a solution. It was a co-creative learning process.

A great example is the family vacation. Assume that one person gathers all the various ideas, criteria, wishes, expectations of each family member and uses the best analysis and logic to calculate the optimum vacation to make the most people most happy.

Bring the plan to your family and as they each evaluate it in their perspectives, they will hate you for letting them down.

However, if you bring the family together to share and discuss their inputs and ideas, various insights and compromises of expectations emerge. When a final plan emerges, each is prepared to satisfice, to decide to be satisfied.

This is certainly not the case in modern politics in which the goal is to keep reshaping and redescribing the bill or the candidate until just enough disparate people will vote in favor. There is no process of co-creation, of transformation, of becoming a community ready to accept a common solution.

In a co-creative approach to problem solving, it is accepted that no one person understands the problem and there is no one ultimate coherent decision framework. As I often tell my students and clients, if you have a clear understanding of the problem, you do not understand the problem, because the problem is not clear in and of itself.

But as you assemble people who understand bits and pieces of the relevant knowledge, dynamics, and values, and build a cohesive ability to respect and co-create with each other, a new reality can emerge that is ready to be satisfied by a new idea. This is not an easy process.

It is critical to note that it may also be necessary to transform the perspectives of people who were not immersed in the co-creativity to create the context for acceptance and implementation of the ideas developed.

At one of my employers I led a 40 hour study of an organizational issue by about 30 people drawn from all the levels and areas of the company. Interestingly, although all ideas were rejected by senior management when we briefed them, every idea was implemented across the entire company in less than a year. Each participant had moved to a point where the new solutions were obvious, and took action within their authority to make it so. Then they told their peers, who quickly saw the advantages and copied the ideas.

In other words, although the quality of the ideas was great, the greatest impact of the study may well have been the shift in perspective by representative managers, a shift which made the new ideas obvious. With the right participation, not only are the ideas more responsive to the organization's realities, but the organization is more responsive to the ideas.

So as we design deliberate creativity and innovation efforts, it is critical that we include processes which will allow the disparate experts and stakeholders to move their perspectives in ways which not only make new ideas obvious, but make them possible.

Unfortunately, we can only dream of our political process becoming co-creative, and thus truly democratic.

Deliberate Creativity: Idea production or learning?

Being raised almost from birth immersed in the deliberate development of creativity, I learned to constantly focus on getting better ideas and on getting people to accept the ideas.

One of the key tricks was that changing the way we describe and  understand a situation can make better alternatives obvious and possible.  Ironically, I my research forced me to realize that the practice of deliberate creativity can be improved by reconceptualizing it.

When I began to research team creativity, certified professionals in the field of value engineering were kind enough to answer about eighty questions each on three different projects they had done.

As I analyzed the data, I began to see impossibilities. The value engineering process, like the creative problem solving process and many other deliberate creativity approaches is taught as a series of about six steps separating fact finding, problem redefinition, idea generation, idea evaluation and analysis, and preparing proposals to sell the ideas. Most value engineers manage this process in a fixed schedule of steps over a one week, 40 hour, five day sequence with a presentation to management or client on the Friday afternoon.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the best ideas came from teams that spent more time in idea evaluation and proposal writing. If ideas are generated before these steps, how can investing more time in the later steps generate better ideas earlier in the process?

As I examined my own working experience, I noticed something. Many projects had one or more really cool ideas that made a major impact. As I examined them, I realized that many of these ideas had popped into our heads as we were immersed in the tedium of analysis and proposal writing. I informally surveyed my colleagues and found that most of them had similar stories.

Here is my interpretation. The deliberate creative processes tend to be described like a manufacturing process. You get your specifications, you acquire resources (facts and knowledge), produce ideas, inspect for quality, pack and ship. Of course in a manufacturing process, you don't make the product better in inspection or in packaging.

It seems to make more sense to think of the creative process as an individual or team getting smarter and smarter about the problem until a solution is obvious. Even in creative techniques like brainstorming the ideas generated are not as important as the way the process changes the group culture and enables team members to learn about other perspectives on the project. In this view, it makes sense that the team is best prepared to create as it leaves at the end of the presentation.

In response to this model I have made a few changes in my attempts to help teams be more creative. I plan all the creative steps and techniques for the effect on the team's attitudes and knowledge, as well as for output. I take breaks during the documentation phase and throw some impossible problem we have already given up on at the team for a silly creativity exercise to refresh their minds before they get back to writing. The resulting ideas are amazing. And I try to schedule time after the presentations so that if the listeners raise objections, the team can immediately rethink a better solution in the light of the new information provided by the evaluator. Again, this is when the team is at the peak of their powers, and can amaze you.

So, just as we see that some of the best creative ideas are hidden by the way we think about things, the ways we think about improving creativity can also hide great potential.